Book Tales . . . woo-ooo

I've been thinking lately about book moods and how I decide what to read next. (Yep, I'm blogging about books—again.) Since reading is a regular part of my life—we're talking the same commitment level here as brushing my teeth (I never miss a day)—this is major. I'm always reading something. I have a stack of books by my bed that are on my "To Read" list so that when I finish the one I'm currently reading, I'm ready with the next one. I don't have time for unnecessary breaks. I'm kind of a geek like that.

(You may remember my love affair with books from such posts as this top-10 list from yesteryear and this follow-up post.) [Read that with the voice of Troy McClure from The Simpsons.]

I feel a personal responsibility to read some quality mixed in with my book candy, which I'm not above. The quality, I feel, keeps me from getting Alzheimer's. That being said, I've lately been inhaling a certain lighthearted fictional series about aristocratic British spies in the early 1800s—think Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy armed with pistols and investigating a bit of espionage . . . whilst falling in love. Sickly sweet book candy, in other words. Between trips to the library for the next in the series, I have interspersed books from the Anne of Green Gables series (which I've never read until now—shocking, right?). L.M. Montgomery is pretty classic, but I'd still put Anne in the "Old But Still Fun" category.

Anyway, this is all to say that, though the last two months have been fraught with book candy in bulk, I usually make a concerted effort to mix it up a bit with a few quote-unquote classics. (I like seeing "quote-unquote" written out. It's soooo ironic.) I like to throw some oldies and some classics in with my leisure reading for the purposes of being more well read, making my brain work harder, and reading things that might be more worthwhile, if sometimes a bit more difficult, than said book candy.

But one man's candy might be another man's substance. And another man's substance might be another's unattempted classic. Or completely the other way around.

A lot of these thoughts were prompted by a conversation I had with a friend about Pride and Prejudice. She said she stopped reading it because the language was hard to get into. I was taken aback because it's a book I know and love, but this made me think that sometimes we're afraid of books—and sometimes unnecessarily so. Sometimes merely the mention of the word "classic" can make your brain instantly build a wall and moat around a piece of literature that makes you never want to attempt it. You don't see me diving head first into Ulysses or Jude the Obscure, for instance, because I've heard they're long and difficult and, well, obscure. Sometimes the wall and moat are justified, but sometimes climbing and conquering such a wall gives me a sense of accomplishment and often leads me to undiscovered treasure, made all the more worthwhile because it did not come easily.

But THAT being said, and before I sound too preachy, all classics are not created equal, in my eyes. Some, like Jane Eyre, I undoubtedly love and think deserve the label. Many are surprisingly accessible. But to others, like Wuthering Heights or Tess of the D'Urbervilles, I say, "Next." I guess I'm slightly lazy about my classics; I really only like the ones I can get into. Sometimes it takes work and barreling through the first 100 pages (as was the case with Anna Karenina or Du Maurier's Rebecca), because I know from experience that it's after that that the magic sometimes happens. As per Rebecca, I would have called the first half a bore. But after the first 100 pages, I was totally hooked and would have called it a page turner.

So what would comprise a list of classics I actually liked? How kind of you to ask.

For instance.

My Favorite Classic Novels

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Obviously. (And all other Austen novels. Obviously.)
2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë.
3. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck.
4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. (Blogged about this before. See links above.)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
6. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
7. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner.
8. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier.
9. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
10. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. (I've seen this on classic lists, but in my mind it's really just a sweet, well-written love story. But since it was on someone's official list, it's going here. It makes me look cooler.)
11. The Call of the Wild by Jack London.
12. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.
13. Possession by A.S. Byatt. (I've seen this on numerous lists of classics too. I don't know that I would classify it as such, but I did love it.)
14. Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
15. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. (This should serve as an example for the point of this post. I was intimidated when I started it and couldn't get into it. But I kept at it, and I found something that helped—the longer my sittings were, the easier the language became. But if I read 15 minutes here or there, I was totally lost.)
16. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

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And, just for fun (and so I don't sound like a complete literary snob), to which "classics" would I give the proverbial iron fist? Some I despised, some I just couldn't get into, but here they are:

Classic Novels I Have Not Been Able to Get Behind

1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
2. Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. (To be fair, I didn't even finish it. In fact, I didn't finish most of these. But this one was so awful! I couldn't, in good conscience, finish it because it bored me to tears.)
3. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis.
4. Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
6. How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn.
7. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. (I found it morally offensive and therefore too hard to read.)
8. Waverly by Sir Walter Scott.

Maybe I would feel differently about some of these if I gave them a second chance, especially now that I'm older and wiser, but who knows. I'm not ready for second chances yet.

Any classics you'd like to laud or iron fist? Come on, now's the time to vent about all that high school/college English reading you had to do.